High speed rail in Australia

High speed rail is now a mature technology, being adopted in many countries and is now mainstream. Australia is late in considering high speed rail. The Australian population is well suited, being clumped in cities along the east coast. Access to cities is increased and benefits for populations along the route are significant. Air routes between Brisbane and Sydney and Sydney and Melbourne are two of the busiest in the world. High speed rail would reduce the number of flights and free up airport slots for long haul international flights at airports such as Sydney which are approaching full capacity. In some European centres, rail has taken over from air transport. Eg Paris to Brussels. On this route rail has become the only option due to its high efficiency and low cost.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: We have a Cooperative Research Centre for Rail Innovation based in Brisbane, but fast train ambitions are continually thwarted in this country. Listen to this poignant interview from 1987. Poignant because Dr Paul Wild, a truly great astronomer, former leader of fast train research and indeed chief executive of CSIRO is now dead and should have perhaps received more recognition for his work. And then there's the way the detailed plan went nowhere.

Paul Wild: The route comes out of Sydney, goes through places like Campbelltown, Bowral, Goulburn. Canberra is the stop of the fast trains. It then goes through to Cooma which of course has terrific potential for the snow. Bombala, Orbost, all the way along the Gippsland strip into Dandenong and the heart of Melbourne. It surprises people that the kind of market we're looking at would involve 30 trains a day in each direction, most of them only stopping in Canberra, a few of them stopping at the smaller places along the line.

Robyn Williams: How quickly could I get from Sydney to Canberra?

Paul Wild: One hour, Sydney to Canberra.

Robyn Williams: And to Melbourne?

Paul Wild: Sydney to Melbourne, three hours. Canberra to Melbourne, two hours.

Robyn Williams: And what do you think that would cost when the whole thing gets going?

Paul Wild: On the present currency figures the average fare would be $35 from Sydney to Canberra, $105 Sydney to Melbourne.

Robyn Williams: Would it actually be able to go right to the centre of cities, because that's usually the huge advantage of rail transport vis-à-vis airlines where you spend half the time in travel actually getting to the airport and then hanging about, whereas if you can get right to the city centre you'll be fine.

Paul Wild: Yes, we aim to begin at Central Station in Sydney under Chalmers St, there's already a platform there, Platform 26 and 27, it leads nowhere, it's just a tunnel with blank ends ready to be used. We understand it will become available. We tunnel out of that and there will be another station called Airport, very close to the airport, five minutes from Sydney to the airport, but if you go flat-out, three-and-a-half. Then at the other end there would be a very important station at Dandenong but we plan to go into the heart of Melbourne, probably Jolimont. So that is right at the city of Melbourne.

Robyn Williams: Do we know what the average journey will be like compared to, say, the bullet trains in Japan or even the very fast trains going to Lyon?

Paul Wild: It will be very similar, very quiet and smooth. When you look out of the window you won't be able to count the mile posts or the kilometre posts any longer because they'll go past too quickly, but if you look into the middle distance it will seem quite natural. Inside the train there will be a reasonable sense of spaciousness and even luxury. A businessman will be able to have telephones and faxes and the tourist will be able to have videos and so on. I hope the food will be excellent.

Robyn Williams: In the feasibility study have you worked out how much traffic might be taken off the Hume Highway?

Paul Wild: It could take a considerable amount of the long distance traffic, even 40% of it, in cars. Although we're going to carry freight, most of our freight would be express freight, and initially it wouldn't take many of the semitrailers off the highway because they are dealing with a lower cost. One day however it may be possible to run dedicated freight trains which will eat lower down into the freight market, and I think everyone except the truck drivers themselves would be pleased if there were less trucks on the Hume Highway.

Robyn Williams: And when can I buy my first ticket?

Paul Wild: I can give you a timetable now, but 1995 is when we hope the first train will run.

Robyn Williams: Dr Paul Wild on The Science Show in 1987. He was a former head of CSIRO. And they thought they'd get it running by 1995. Well, we now have further ambitions in 2010 for fast trains. David George is the chief executive of the CRC for Rail Innovation, a national body based in Brisbane.

David George: The CRC for Rail Innovation's report has come to the conclusion that a number of factors have changed since high speed rail was last seriously investigated in Australia, in particular forecast population changes, an increased focus on emissions, but in particular the fact that high speed rail is now a mature technology and very high speeds are now being operated around the world.

High speed rail isn't just the preserve of first class countries like Japan and France, also we're finding that high speed rail is being seriously investigated in countries like Poland, Morocco, Turkey, Iran, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, India, Russia and Argentina, just to name a few. So high speed rail has actually become mainstream around the world, and in some respects Australia is somewhat late in taking the issue seriously.

Robyn Williams: Very late indeed, I would have thought; you know, the 21st century. But do we have advantages? Because most of the population is on the coast and in about four or five big cities.

David George: That's actually a great advantage, that a very large proportion of Australia's population is on the Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane axis, which means that a high speed rail network linking those cities and cities like Newcastle and Canberra would actually link a very high proportion of Australia's population.

Robyn Williams: But the question is of putting up the infrastructure. The fact that you've already got a railway corridor between those cities, would that make life easier?

David George: For high speed rail one needs a dedicated corridor, and in fact corridor preservation and protection is one of the key issues. For high speed rail (and we're talking about trains over 250 kilometres an hour) it's not feasible or possible to link those with existing trains. Practically you cannot have high speed rail operations going through level crossings or mixing with low speed freight operations. Just for safety reasons it has to be on dedicated track, which means one of the first and early tasks is to actually preserve corridor for the future for high speed rail in Australia.

Robyn Williams: So it would be a brand new, rather disruptive enterprise to set that up.

David George: It's a considerable challenge and it takes considerable costs, but the benefits are enormous, and particularly in the transformational impact it has on cities. For those of your listeners who've ridden on the TGV in France or the bullet train in Japan, the impact in terms of access to cities is enormous, the impact on development along corridors is enormous, and Europe, for example, has just become now a much smaller and much more easily accessible continent.

Robyn Williams: Any idea of the proportion of the standard domestic plane connections that would be reduced automatically if you'd had that TGV connection instead?

David George: On the corridor between Sydney and Melbourne, it's the fourth densest air traffic corridor in the world, every day there are some 78 planes flying between Sydney and Melbourne. If a high speed rail network between Sydney and Melbourne were put in place and if that took greater than 50% market share, and all the experiences in Europe and Japan would be that it would take greater than 50% market share, then there would be an enormous transfer of people from planes into trains, with environmental advantages.

One of the issues also is that it will actually help solve some of the potential congestion at Sydney airport. By having a service between Sydney and Melbourne it would release slots at Sydney airport, and obviously if that service linked to Canberra, for example, that would release more slots, and this would allow more slots for long distance planes and help the country overcome the rather vexed issue of what happens when Sydney airport comes to capacity.

Robyn Williams: When you come to the two measures of carbon emissions, the greenhouses gases, and sheer energy use, how do planes versus those very fast trains stack up? Is there a considerable saving with trains?

David George: Trains have got an extremely good record in terms of emissions and in terms of low fuel use. In the European context, for example, the passenger kilometres per unit of energy for high speed rail is 170, for bus is 55, for private car is 30, and for plane is 20. So rail is streets ahead in that context. If high speed rail were operational and attracted 50% market share between Sydney and Melbourne, for example, it would reduce aviation turbine fuel usage by 150 million litres per year, and if it linked Canberra that would be an extra 37 million litres per year. That would be the equivalent, by 2020, of a reduction of half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year. So the impact of high speed rail, which is driven by electricity and therefore can use renewable fuel, can be immense in terms of fuel usage and in terms of reduction in transport emissions.

Robyn Williams: Of course we're also concerned about the peak oil problem, the availability of those fossil fuels. What's the choice of technologies? There are a whole number of different sorts of very fast trains. More recently we've even heard of the Chinese which have a levitated magnetic system going very, very quickly, well over 500 kilometres per hour. What does Australia have to choose from in that sort of range?

David George: The two major choices, and there are a number of other technologies emerging as well, but the two major choices are the conventional high speed rail such as the TGV, Train à Grande Vitesse, in France, and the bullet train in Japan. But Maglev is also a technology and that certainly has some use in China, for example, linking Shanghai airport, and that can do very, very high speeds very, very quietly. But the advantage of conventional high speed rail is that it can also link in to the existing networks.

So in terms of approaching cities...and corridors into cities is always a real challenge for any transport mode, it can switch from high speed rail network onto an existing rail network, or a train could go for three-quarters of its journey on a high speed rail network and finish the journey off on the conventional network. That advantage of linking in to the existing network which allows phasing during construction and allows linkage to other cities is a significant advantage. But Maglev is also an attractive technology, but particularly where it's seen as a stand-alone network.

Robyn Williams: Yes, that could get us from Sydney to Melbourne, Melbourne to Sydney in about just an hour-and-a-half or something, wouldn't it?

David George: The speeds are phenomenal, but it's also quite telling that in countries such as Germany and China they are still progressing conventional high speed rail as well as examining Maglev, so it's almost a case of looking at existing well proven technology versus absolutely leading edge technology, and that's a choice Australia needs to make.

Robyn Williams: Making that choice, if we decided today that we wanted to go ahead, how long do you think it would take to set up the system so that one major route could be working?

David George: That's an extremely good question. The first step that needs to be taken, and this is what the CRC for Rail innovation is recommending, is that an in-depth study of the costs and benefits of high speed rail in the Australian context needs to be looked at, and not so much from an in-depth engineering perspective but to demonstrate that high speed rail is economic. That could take a year or so, and then the government is in position to start to make economic choices on whether or not to build high speed rail. But from then onwards it would be a number of years until high speed rail were established.

One of the key issues is actually things like staging. So, for example, if the vision is to ultimately link Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, it may be that staging might be via starting with Newcastle and/or Canberra, for example, and linking those to Sydney and extending beyond. And if high speed rail can be staged then there are deliverables early on that mean that the population of Australia can start to enjoy benefits of high speed rail. Experience elsewhere and in Europe is that once the population starts using high speed rail there is an enormous clamouring for more.

Robyn Williams: I can imagine that happening, but seriously, how much do you think the politicians want to know about this? Because anything that costs a lot of money for infrastructure notoriously doesn't get up.

David George: There is a challenge politically, but high speed rail is actually a massive nation-building exercise and it's transformational in its impact in Australia. So the hope is that our governments will actually adopt a long-term visionary approach to high speed rail, at minimum to study the economics and to preserve the corridors, because its time will come, whether it's in the next two years, next five years or the next 10 or 20 years, its time will come. I'd like to think that our politicians do have the vision and will grasp the nettle and will examine this issue really seriously.

Robyn Williams: I asked the head of Qantas Alan Joyce whether he would like to combine aircraft and very fast trains. He was, I think, rather surprised by the question, but it has happened, hasn't it.

David George: Certainly. In the UK Richard Branson is well known for running airlines and rail networks. I think in other countries such as France the airlines are looking at investing in rail. Between Paris and Brussels there are no longer scheduled airline services because rail has the total market share. So it's actually in airlines' interest to be involved in high speed rail and to see it as complimentary. It could release slots from short-haul planes to allow long-haul planes into congested airports, so it would actually allow the airlines to concentrate on more profitable longer-distance travel.

Robyn Williams: A personal question to you about getting on trains, obviously if you're working in the business you'd like them. Tell me of the joys of getting on a very fast train for you.

David George: Travelling by train is a great experience because it's relaxing, you can open your computer, you can use your mobile phone, you can stroll down to the buffet and have a beer or a glass of wine. It's a pleasurable experience; in contrast to what a number of us to every day which is travel by air where just the trial of getting to the airport in the first place is a real challenge, then one has to get through security and then hopefully the airplane is going to run on time, not always. In the plane, very cramped positions, very difficult even to open the computer. And the same process at the other end.

So city centre to city centre journey times by air are in the three to four hour bracket by the time one's put in all of the contingency for delays and for security and the like. And that's the magic figure for high speed rail; if it can come in the three to four hour transit time between Sydney and Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane, and existing technology will potentially allow this, then high speed rail will certainly get up relative to airlines on those corridors.

Robyn Williams: And we don't have the freezing weather that they endured between France and England that stranded a few very fast trains in the Channel tunnel.

David George: That was one particular experience. I think the technology to obviate that in the future is understood and I'm sure Eurostar will be tackling that with some vigour.

Robyn Williams: Thank you very much indeed.

David George: Thank you.

Robyn Williams: And here's another question; what if fast trains took up so much load away from Sydney airport that it removed the need to build that second airport we keep worrying about? Untold billions saved. David George runs the Cooperative Research Centre for Rail Innovation based in Brisbane.

Paul Reader :

29 Mar 2010 10:21:27pm

Thanks for interesting update. As a Tasmanian I have thought for about the last 15 years that high-speed MagLev would be an ideal solution to replace Tassies narrow gauge antiquated system, even if it required a longer route than existing track.

Rod :

Loco :

18 Apr 2010 8:57:56pm

Given the cost of a Brisbane Sydney Melbourne and maybe Adelaide as a possible route of service, it is still going to be a costly exercise to travel on such a system as high speed rail.I doubt, I will see it in my lifetime.

Neddie CGoon :

19 Sep 2010 12:24:55pm

Having been an air traffic controller for over 30 years, I have seen the expansion of air travel in Australia and the associated monumentally costly and more complex infrastructure grow enormously. Simply put, the cost of a High Speed Rail would shadow into insignificance agains the costs required by the aviation industry in extra fuel burn / holding delays and extra airport infrastructues ( new airport for sydney?? ) which will be incurred in the coming years. Seeing the Sydney-Melbourne air-route is the 4th busiest paired air-route in the world, if a High Speed Rail connection could save maybe 20 or 30 domestic flights a day through Sydney then delays into Sydney airport could be almost eliminated. Add to this savings in green house gasses and reduced freight on the Hume Highway and you see the efficiency of rail start to really make a difference economically and socially.

steve guy :

17 Apr 2013 10:27:30am

In twenty or so years time what will the aircraft be useing for fuel? High speed rail should be the alternative to new airport terminals.I can not believe that it would take 40 years to build the damn thing. We only need to look at the railways that were built in the 19th and early 20th century to realise that it will not take anywhere near that amount of time. ie they had no D9 bulldozers and such!!